“It’s a humorous, anecdotal story that Robert re-tells for laughs,” a spokesman said Sunday. Thanks for clarifying before this thing turned into WWIII. Like, dude, when you’re weighing the risk/reward of a joke, and “laughs” are the best case scenario, while nuclear holocaust is the worst — you’ve got to pull the plug on the material.

I’m sorry, there just are some people you don’t mess with.

Apparently, it was a gift after all, which is weird nonetheless. What’s weirder is his reasoning for giving it to Putin. “[Kraft] credits President Putin for modernizing the Russian economy.” What? So you give him a Super Bowl ring? I guess I’m just not that familiar with billionaire gestures. “He loves that his ring is at the Kremlin and, as he stated back in 2005, he continues to have great respect for Russia and the leadership of President Putin.”

Well isn’t that nice. Not sure how this thing blew out of control but holy shit Kraft must have some killer deadpan delivery or the guy who broke this story is, for all intents and purposes, tone deaf. If you need someone to blame the faux story on, you can start by pointing the finger at sports bloggers like myself and the 24-hour news cycle. It just sounded like such a damn good story. A slow pitched softball. Were we supposed to lay off the possibility that a despotic, draconian Russian demi-God strong armed a piece of kitschy sports memorabilia from a dweeby owner? Of course not.